Tracing Is Practice With Guardrails, Not BusyworkNew!!
I've heard tracing dismissed as busywork more than once, usually by well-meaning people who assume real learning only happens when a child is generating something from scratch. I understand the instinct, but it misunderstands what tracing is doing developmentally, and it undersells a useful tool. The hidden work inside a traced line Handwriting isn't one […]
Is It “Can’t Write” or “Won’t Write”? The Difference Changes EverythingNew!!
A child pushes the paper away. Maybe they cry, maybe they just go quiet and refuse to pick up the pencil. The instinct a lot of parents have is to read this as defiance — my kid won't even try. In my experience, that's the less common explanation, and treating every refusal as a behavior […]
Left-Handed Writers Need Better Setup, Not Lower ExpectationsNew!!
About one in ten of the kids who've come through my classroom over the years have been left-handed, and I get a specific, worried version of the same question from their parents almost every time: is this going to be harder for them? The honest answer is: a little different, not harder — and the […]
Sight Words Are Not Magic. They Are Mileage.New!!
Sight word lists confuse a lot of parents, and I understand why. "The," "was," "said," "there" — these words show up on a list to memorize with no obvious pattern connecting them, and it can feel like an arbitrary exercise handed down without explanation. It isn't arbitrary. Understanding what's happening when a child practices these […]
Five Quiet Minutes Can Change a Child’s HandwritingNew!!
Parents often tell me they feel like they should be doing more — a workbook, a structured curriculum, thirty minutes at the kitchen table every night. Then that plan lasts about four days before it collapses under its own weight, and they feel like they've failed at something. I want to make the opposite case: […]
Twenty Years of Kindergarten Changed How I See Letter ReversalsNew!!
I used to correct every reversed letter I saw. Early in my career, if a child wrote a backwards "b," I'd stop them, show them the right way, and have them redo it. I thought that was thoroughness. Twenty years later, I do almost none of that, and the shift in how I think about […]
Teach the Name Before the AlphabetNew!!
Walk into almost any kindergarten classroom in the first weeks of school and you'll see the same thing on the wall: name cards, cubby labels, sign-in sheets, all built around one specific word for each child — their own name. Long before "A is for apple," a child's name is doing the real work of […]
Before the Pencil Grip: The Small Muscles That Make Writing PossibleNew!!
Parents ask me about pencil grip more than almost anything else. They've usually read that there's a "correct" grip — the tripod grip, thumb and first two fingers pinching the pencil near the tip — and they're worried their child is holding it wrong. Here's what I've learned after years of watching kids learn to […]
When a Child Writes Their Name Backwards, Start HereNew!!
The first time a parent shows me a paper with a backwards "S" in their child's name, they're usually apologizing for it. They slide it across the table like evidence of something gone wrong, and they want to know what they did — or didn't do. Almost always, the answer is: nothing. This is normal. […]